In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread. Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.
A number of posts discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion.
Researchers have had two responses to this allegation: First, data don’t indicate that vaccines increase the risk that children will contract other infections. Second, vaccines have become much more targeted over time, often involving fewer antigens to stimulate the immune system than earlier versions. Vaccines for pneumococcus, whooping cough, and other diseases now often contain only sugar molecules or proteins from the coat of a virus in order to produce an immune response. By this measure, children get more shots, but they contain fewer antigens.
But again, the way to test this is not through arguments about how the body works, but by looking at children who are vaccinated more and seeing whether they are more likely to develop autism. It’s possible to measure how many antibodies generated by different vaccines children have, and a 2013 study by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found there was no relationship between a measure of these vaccine antibodies and risk of an autism diagnosis.
People who are concerned about vaccine safety often want new randomized controlled trials of vaccines. (Approved vaccines have generally been tested against a placebo, another vaccine, or a placebo that contains other ingredients in the vaccine but not the antigen that provokes an immune response.) But such studies, though the medical gold standard, are hard to do: Doctors already consider the current vaccines the standard of care, raising ethical questions. It’s also hard to imagine parents who either doubt or believe in vaccination but are willing to have their child’s vaccination status decided by a random number generator.
